Johnston’s red, white and blue star-spangled spandex and chiseled
physique in the
Ultimate Fighting Championship’s early days stood out next to
the mullet-clad truckers in nondescript sweat pants claiming
faux-marital arts styles. Johnson’s victories, however, are not
memorable. Johnson posted a 5-5 record, 2-4 inside the Octagon. His
.500 career spanned just one year and 15 days. Two of his Octagon
losses were to UFC hall of famers Mark Coleman
and Ken
Shamrock; another came to the rugged Frye.

Today, 16 years after his last professional fight, Johnston serves
as a stay-at-home dad to his 3-year-old daughter, Kaiya.

“I’m pretty much just being a dad right now,” he told Sherdog.com.
“If I had anymore [kids], I’m pretty sure I’d have a heart
attack.”

Known as the “Fury” during his combat sports career, a technical
knockout loss to Dan Bobish at
UFC 14
in July 1997 ended his professional fighting endeavors. These days,
he resides an hour east of Phoenix, removed from the Northern
California fighting boom he helped facilitate. It was Johnston’s
arrival at the
American Kickboxing Academy that brought no-holds-barred
fighting to the attention of Javier Mendez. The rest is history at
AKA, a top gym in the MMA field since its inception. Johnston
claims his slice of the catalyst pie, something Mendez honors with
a photograph on the wall declaring the American Kickboxing Academy
started with Johnston in the early 1990s.

Touted for Northern California Golden Gloves champion talents in
the UFC, Johnston had the trap muscles to go along with a clean-cut
fighter’s snarl. The days of being a formative figure at AKA seem a
world away now that his involvement in the sport is minimal at
best.

“I’ve done some training but nothing on a permanent basis,” he
said. “I was training guys for MMA on the B-circuit probably up
until about a year ago.”

The most notable happening as a mentor to young fighters in recent
years was Johnston’s work with jiu-jitsu world champion Tanner Rice
out in Redding, Calif. He maintains a relationship with the
Japanese fight scene. A judoka, Johnston spent much time in the
Land of the Rising Sun entertaining the masses through professional
wrestling. Mixed martial arts and pro wrestling mesh more fluidly
there than they do stateside. In Japan, pro wrestlers engage in
legitimate grappling and fight training in order to prepare for
their shoot-style scripted bouts. That was the allure for Johnston,
a physical entertainer who suffered a personal tragedy -- a massive
stroke -- while living his dream across the Pacific in August
2001.

File
Photo

Mendez honors the “Fury” at AKA.

“The type of stroke I had, 90 percent of people die within the
first year,” Johnston said. “The other 10 percent really cannot do
anything on their own. My rehab has turned me from almost
paralyzed. I was only able to move my arms for the first four
months after the stroke. Now I’m able to beat the odds [and] get
mentally tough for my daughter. I’m a hundred times, a million
times tougher than I was as a fighter.”

A tear in a blood vessel resulted in a blood clot, cutting off
blood flow to his brainstem, which communicates messages from the
brain to the spinal cord. The stroke swiftly cut down the life
Johnston had been living. Emotional responses became random.
Involuntary crying occurred almost every day, even though there was
much about which to be somber. The loss of independence, balance
and coordination to function on a daily basis was a reality
Johnston confronted. Conveyance was the most significant loss of
all: facial expressions like smiles and laughs -- any positive or
negative acknowledgement -- were seemingly unattainable. Tones of
voice to target particular meanings felt impossible to muster for a
man who had been a fan of joking around with accents.

Johnston refused a wheelchair, sticking to a crutch until he could
regain his ability to walk alone. The toll was mentally exhausting,
too. Imagine having to recover the ability to chew.

“The improvement from the original stroke probably stopped about
... probably nine years ago,” Johnston said through his permanently
raspy vocal cords, estimating he has been able to regain 60 to 70
percent of his functionality, although his left side has not
recovered as well as his right. “I can’t complain. Nothing in the
world can be worse than anything like that.”

In the first year of marriage, the bond between Johnston and his
wife, Maggie, was strengthened by suffering. They persevered to
restore and redefine the quality of life they had envisioned. Even
a simple kiss was a challenge. He believed love’s patience could
bring him back from the depths of his most significant battle.
Johnston met his wife at the American Kickboxing Academy in San
Jose, Calif., years before they became involved romantically; they
married in the 12 months preceding his stroke. He had retired due
to concussion concerns.

“My wife has been excellent,” he said, noting she suffers from a
nerve disorder that keeps them both striving for better health
while remaining fully committed to their daughter. “I’m the kind of
guy that’s going to try anything, no matter what. I fail, [but] if
I fail, I keep going. Success is 99 percent failure. She tries to
steer me in that right direction. She lets me know if I should do
something or not. If she tells me I shouldn’t do something, it’s a
legitimate concern.”

The cause of the stroke is something a fighter -- or anyone in
contact sports -- could encounter on any given night.

“It was trauma, in layman’s terms,” Johnston said. “I was in Japan,
training some guys in Pride. I got hit, rattled my cage a bit. It
was a one-in-a-million deal.”

Although Johnston had not fought since 1997, entering 2001, he did
not think his fighting career was over. After all, he was the kind
of guy who jumped at the idea of “real fighting” when people
thought a UFC bout could end in death. The worst that can happen in
the UFC now, Johnston says, is one of the fighters walking away
with a movie deal. Four years after the last time he stepped in the
cage, he was still scrapping regularly, even if he was not in a
live-competition environment.

“The timing in MMA and catch wrestling, it wasn’t difficult to get
into pro wrestling [and] shoot fighting,” he said. “There was a
long tradition, from Karl Gotch on, of some really superior
fighters who were doing this long before the Ultimate Fighting
Championship. Antonio Inoki and the younger guys that were his
students, and of Karl Gotch -- every day, we trained before we
wrestled. It wasn’t your typical [pro] wrestling, American-style.
It was pretty hardcore.”